Portra 800

To end off this group of SXSW posts and rolls is this one covering the second to last night of SXSW for me, March 17th. The reason this is the last one for now is because I didn’t finish my last roll of film covering March 18th because once again I have a broken camera. But I’ll leave that to that roll post.

Continuing from the end of the last roll post, let’s talk numbers and this roll is interesting. It’s split 13 small and 25 large with 3 bad, 12 ok, 21 good, and 2 great. The two great are the Steam Down picture I talked about in its own post and one I’ll talk about here later on. Like the previous roll, this one has a really big skew on its “ok” pictures with only 2 of them being given a large picture billing. These two are picture number “3” which is of Urban Heat, the one with Horstmann and Paxel and number “35” which is the all orange picture of Steam Down in the roughly middle of the collage. I think what I might do moving forward is remove the ok category altogether. It simply doesn’t mean much and I should be more critical about the pictures I take. Ok ends up just being a cop out compromise.

Since I’ve talked relatively at length about both Urban Heat and especially CHAMELEON LIME WHOOPIEPIE I’m going to ignore them in this post. So we’ll go on first to the one artist I didn’t talk about yet which is the Austin based Primo the Alien. Also taken at The Creek and the Cave right after Urban Heat, I took a reasonable amount of pictures that I think for the most part all work to varying degrees. As usual, there’s some level of me wanting to be a bit tighter on focus in some of these pictures, especially the one of Primo reaching out towards her guitarist. I do like that picture, but the focus being soft ruins it a bit. The vertical picture below of just the guitarist and keyboard player is cleaner and more successful in a really vanilla kinda way.

Now onto that second great picture, it’s the one right next to that picture of Primo the Alien’s guitarist. Honestly, both of the pictures immediately to the right of that picture are pretty good, but the one I’m talking about is the bottom of those to pictures. There’s just something immediately fun and exciting about the poses and actions that really works. While I will say that I don’t really want to capture the photographer and safety personnel in the background, I don’t think it’s the end of the world. This is also a picture that has a really interesting effect with the grain. The grain is more visible on the orange parts of the frame as opposed to the blue which creates another kind of visual contrast that is unique to these two pictures, even more so than the one I mentioned in the post about Steam Down. It’s not even that there isn’t grain in the blue parts of the frame, they just don’t speckle as strongly as in the orange-y red parts. Unlike the picture I talked about in that post about Steam Down, this one is a pretty clear triangle composition where the third piece is to the back and thus has a reduced role. As a result, you could maybe call this a 2.5 subject composition with two strong subjects and one weaker group. But the 2 main subjects really pop. Also unlike that picture which reads from left to right, this one reads from right to left with a strong payoff on the left side. If the other picture has a more rapturous and almost spiritual feeling with the upturned pose, this one is just hype and energy. It’s a cool dichotomy that I think is really fun and as a pair of pictures works better than alone, even when the individual pictures are both great on their own.

Since I mentioned grain in the previous paragraph, let’s talk about it in general. This roll was shot on Portra 800 and pushed 1 stop. It definitely has a looser grain than the previous roll though it isn’t too bad. It really proves that point that I saw earlier this year that Portra is really resilient to pushing 1 or 2 stops. Both the color and grain aren’t super strongly affected which makes for a really useful property, especially for these kinds of low light pictures.

If it wasn’t obvious, this collage has a bit of a more unique shape and construction. Part of that is due to the picture size distribution. And the other part is color. This roll has a pretty interesting distribution of colors which I wanted to highlight in the actual collage. Pretty much, like in that CHAMELEON LIME WHOOPIEPIE post, the orange pictures are to the right. So while there is the temporal aspect to the pictures in general, there’s also a color separation and gradient occuring across the collage from left to right and to some extent from top to bottom. Generally, I’m pretty lazy at putting these together and since a lot of them have naturally grouped sections by subject they’re not so interesting to put together. However, in situations where they’re a bit more random and sparsely connected subject wise I think I want to explore more of these secondary types of groupings too as they can create a pretty interesting collage overall visually. Anyways, that’s it for SXSW rolls for now. I’m gonna put up a non-photo post next just as a wrap up and I’ll be developing that last roll soon as I’ve finished shooting it but I probably won’t get to it for another few weeks. Hopefully I actually get to it then but we’ll see. I’ve maybe got some excitingly different subject matter coming up soon that isn’t live music related but it’ll be a bit until then. So I’ll end it here.